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Tag Archives: Bailouts

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Tuesday, April 10, 2018:

According to the latest report from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), released on Monday, the U.S. economy is going great guns. But that growth, no matter how robust, will never catch up with government spending. Hence, despite that growth, annual deficits of a trillion dollars will arrive two years sooner than originally projected.

That previous projection, made by the CBO last June, showed a deficit of $563 billion for 2018, rising to $689 billion next year. Now, with the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act behind them, the CBO projects this year’s deficit to be $804 billion and next year’s to be just a touch below a trillion dollars, at $981 billion.

The CBO is considered by many to be less partisan than most government entities and as likely to create more accurate projections than those coming from the White House’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB). It covered itself with this disclaimer:

Increasingly frustrated over Congress’ inability or unwillingness to dismantle ObamaCare, President Trump tweeted earlier this week, “Since Congress can’t get its act together on HealthCare, I will be using the power of the pen to give great HealthCare to many people — FAST”; and now he has.

Of course the president cannot “give” anything to someone that hasn’t been taken from someone else, but other than that, the president is heading in the right direction. Leaks concerning his executive order, which he signed on Thursday, were confirmed: His order points to less government intervention and more individual freedom.

Calling the present Affordable Care Act an “Obamacare Nightmare,” Trump said his alternative is better:

This article was published by The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Monday, August 21, 2017:

It didn’t take Steve Bannon – Trump’s chief political strategist – very long to bid adieu and pick up where he left off at Breitbart. On Friday he explained his widely anticipated departure:

On August 7th, I talked to [Chief of Staff John] Kelly and to the President, and I told them that my resignation would be effective the following Monday, on the 14th. I’d always planned on spending one year. General Kelly has brought in a great new system, but I said it would be best [to leave]. I want to get back to Breitbart.

On Friday night, he was back at work as Executive Chairman at Breitbart, saying:

For more than six years Republicans have promised that, given the chance, they would repeal the odious, expensive, and unconstitutional healthcare takeover called ObamaCare. Seven times they have voted to repeal it, knowing that then-President Obama, its primary promulgator and author, would veto it.

But voters believed them and when Trump beat Democrat Hillary Clinton in November, it was going to be a shoo-in: full and total repeal at the top of the list. At least that’s what Rep. Mo Brooks, a Republican from Alabama, thought. So he prepared a bill: simple, straightforward, two sentences long:

Sounding rather testy that the Senate didn’t give him what he wanted on Thursday, President Trump tweeted on Saturday morning that he would not only punish senators and their staffs but cut off the government funding of subsidies — estimated to be $8 billion — to hungry insurance companies. He tweeted: “After seven years of ‘talking’ Repeal & Replace, the people of our great country are still being forced to live with imploding ObamaCare!” He then tweeted the not-so-subtle threat:

If a new HealthCare bill is not approved quickly, BAILOUTS for Insurance Companies and BAILOUTS for Members of Congress will end very soon!

It took EURACTIV, the online source that focuses on European policymaking, to report that the Trump administration has signaled that, previous protestations to the contrary, it won’t object to a third Greek bailout. The anonymous Trump administration tipster told its reporters: “We’re looking for the Europeans to help Greece to resolve its economic problems by the Fund [the International Monetary Fund], despite the criticism of many Republicans regarding the two previous bailout programs in 2010 and 2012.”

This anonymous tip kicks to the curb protestations voiced by Trump’s Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin in February that

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Thursday, February 9, 2017:

IMF Headquarters

The report on Greece’s financial condition issued by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) on Monday was dismal, but, said the central bank, its future remains bright. First, the bad news: The EU member will fall far short of the budget-surplus targets put in place in order to get the last bailout. The Greek economy must grow at 3.1 percent but it expanded by only 0.4 percent last year.

However, the IMF said Greece’s economy is expected to grow by 2.7 percent in 2017. An unnamed European Union official who spoke to Bloomberg on the condition of anonymity said that

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Monday, January 2, 2017:

The Central States Teamsters pension plan, covering more than 400,000 participants, expects to receive permission shortly from the Treasury Department to cut benefits to those participants, possibly by as much as 30 percent. At the end of 2014 the plan had $35 billion in liabilities (future promises to participants as they retire) compared to less than $18 billion on hand to pay them.

Right behind Central States was the New York State Teamsters Conference Pension and Retirement Fund, which is also in trouble. Owing nearly $3 billion to its 35,000 plan participants, it has less than $1.3 billion to meet this obligation. Its plan, in its request to the Treasury Department, spelled out just how great the cuts would be:

Under the terms of its last bailout, Athens (above) was required not only to continue to impose harsh austerity terms (higher taxes, less government spending, better accountability, and increased tax collection enforcement onto Greek citizens) but to inform the unelected “higher” European authorities of any change in those terms by Athens.

The dictionary defines civilization as “an ideal state of human culture characterized by a complete absence of barbarism and non-rational behavior.” Rich Galen thinks a better definition is living in a “constant state of positive assumptions.”

Many of those assumptions are coming into question, with many more already proven to be false. One of them is that pension plans are safe, that promises made will be kept, and that the assumptions underlying those plans regarding rates of return on invested assets are reasonable and that they virtually guarantee predictable results.

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Monday, December 12, 2016:

President Roosevelt signs Social Security Act, at approximately 3:30 pm EST on 14 August 1935.

In a moment of surprising candor, Danielle DiMartino Booth, a former advisor to the Federal Reserve, said in a Real Vision TV interview on Saturday that “the Baby Boomers are no longer an actuarial theory. They’re a reality. The checks [from their retirement plans] are being written.”

For years commentators have repeatedly asserted that “when” the Baby Boomers (that generation born between 1946 and 1964) start to retire, they will start using up funds set aside in pension plans, putting those plans into crisis. According to Booth, that day has arrived.

She pointed to the crisis in Dallas that threatens to put the city into bankruptcy, and the report from Calpers (the California Public Employees Retirement System),

The latest jobs report released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) on Friday morning was trumpeted as reflective of an improving economy. The Wall Street Journal said the report “signal[ed] solid momentum in the labor market just days before American voters elect a new president,” while Jeffry Bartash, writing for MarketWatch, said it “shows the seven-year-old economic recovery still has plenty of life despite a slowdown in growth earlier in the year.”

A hard look behind the headline numbers — 161,000 new jobs created in October and the unemployment rate at 4.9 percent — reveals

On Friday, the Treasury Department published the final revenue and spending numbers for the federal government for Fiscal Year 2016, which ended on September 30. According to Treasury’s report, spending increased significantly (by nearly five percent) over the previous year, to more than $3.8 trillion, while revenues remained essentially flat from the year before, at $3.25 trillion. That left a shortfall of approximately $600 billion, forcing the government to borrow 15 cents of every dollar it spent last year. And the two presidential candidates have remained disturbingly silent about the issue.

Said Robert Bixby, the executive director of the Concord Coalition, a non-partisan group that favors reducing the deficit,

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Friday, May 20, 2016:

Corcho Beach in Vieques island, Puerto Rico.

Hidden behind the tentative agreement announced by House Speaker Paul Ryan on Thursday that would allow Puerto Rico some breathing room over its massive $73-billion national debt are the bailouts that are already in place.

The agreement is based on the bill by Rep. Rob Bishop (R-Utah) that creates another government bureaucracy to oversee the orderly “restructuring” (read: massive haircut for PR’s bondholders). When he presented his bill, Bishop said it would “give Puerto Rico access to a court-enforced debt restructuring in exchange for the imposition of a federal fiscal oversight board.”

California Representative Devin Nunes, a middle-of-the-road Republican from the state’s 22ndDistrict with a middling voting record (a Freedom Index rating of just 53), got something right: he sees the coming implosion of underfunded pension and health care plans across the country, and offered a bill to do something about it: force the states and the pension managers to tell the truth about the numbers:

This article was published by The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Wednesday, July 8, 2015:

Nigel Farage

Nigel Farage, named “Briton of the Year” in 2014 by the London Times, has finally found his voice. He noisily departed the Conservative Party in 1992 after the signing of the treaty that created the European Union to start his own UK Independence Party (UKIP). His criticism of the EU has been steady ever since, culminating in his eulogy on Monday: “The European Union is Dying Before our Eyes.”

According to Farage, Sunday’s referendum in Greece sealed its death warrant, even if somehow the Greek PM Alexis Tsipras is able to come to terms with the troika and have them turn on the financial spigot once again: “It [was] a crushing defeat for those Eurocrats who believe that you can simply bulldoze public opinion.” He added,

After running deficits every year since 1973 and paying for them by borrowing, the U.S. commonwealth of Puerto Rico has finally run out of options. On June 28, the island’s Governor Garcia Padilla admitted that its $73 billion “debt is not payable.… We will [shortly] be in a death spiral.” Padilla added: “There is no other option. I would love to have an easier option. This is not politics, this is math.”

This article first appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Monday, June 22, 2015:

The announcement last week by Greece’s central bank that it may be forced to start implementing capital controls — eliminating the ability of Greeks who still have any money in the bank to withdraw it or send it to another country for safekeeping — may just be a ploy to bring more pressure on the Troika (European Central Bank, IMF, and eurozone countries) to release the last batch of funds from Bailout Number Three.

Withdrawals by nervous Greeks began last fall as Bailouts Number One, Two, and Three were only pushing the country further into recession. Withdrawal from the eurozone itself became increasingly likely, with the result that the euro would be replaced in Greece with a new currency with much less purchasing power.

Ever since Greece joined the European Community, later to be called the European Union, it has enjoyed far better credit ratings than it deserved. Assured that default was now no longer an option, central banks and other international financial institutions were more than willing to

On Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal reported that the federal government will be paying $800 billion annually just to service the interest on its massive debt by 2025, up from just over $200 billion currently. By 2021, those interest costs will equal what the government is projected to be spending on national defense, and on non-defense (so-called “discretionary” items), and will greatly exceed those two budget items just by 2025. The Journal also noted that “non-discretionary” items (so-called “mandatory” expenditures) will continue their inexorable march upward, from $2 trillion currently to more than $4 trillion by 2025.

This article first appeared at The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Wednesday, December 11th, 2013:

In Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew’s fawning, obsequious, genuflecting announcement that the president had singlehandedly saved western civilization from a cataclysmic economic disaster, he said that by taking a loss, taxpayers actually scored a victory: